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Friday, May 29, 2015

Since
there's such a scarcity of work on Maria Fitzherbert, I was eager to
get my hands on this James Munson’s 2002 biography of her (Maria Fitzherbert:The Secret Wife of George IV),
which I purchased in Great Britain. But after reading all 372 pages, I
still don't feel all that well acquainted with the woman who secretly
married the Prince of Wales (later to be prince regent, and later still,
King George IV) in 1785.

One of the reasons for this scarcity is
the absence of the lady's letters and diaries, which have enriched
other biographies of Mrs. Fitzherbert's contemporaries, such as
Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. In fact, I felt somewhat cheated by
Munson, who touted his work as the only one having the letters from Mrs.
Fitzherbert's intimate friend, Lady Anne Lindsay. "Previous biographers
knew nothing of these letters or of Lady Anne's journal," Munson tells
us. Oh boy, I thought, new information!

Very few of Mrs.
Fitzherbert's letters to Lady Anne are revealed in these pages. There
are, however, snippets from Lady Anne's diaries which give some insight
into Mrs. Fitzherbert.

Another disappointment was lack of details
about the relationship between the prince and Mrs. Fitzherbert, a twice
widowed Catholic he married in a secret, illegal Anglican ceremony.
They acted as husband and wife for almost twenty years
(non-consecutively), yet there is little information about this
remarkable relationship. The first 150 pages of the book are background
on the two; the last 50 pages deal with the years after the couple's
final break. That leaves about a third of the book to deal with the 20
years they were together.

Not all of the blame for this vagueness
rests on Munson's shoulders. Credit Mrs. Fitzherbert herself and her
"husband" when he became George IV for ordering the destruction the
evidence of their illegal marriage. Upon George IV's death he entrusted
the Duke of Wellington, then prime minister, with the task of burning
all correspondence between himself and Mrs. Fitzherbert.

Mrs.
Fitzherbert complied, asking that only four documents be spared. The
duke and Lord Albermarle met at her residence, she handed them packets
of papers, then left. Her actions prompted Wellington to say she, "was
the most honest woman he'd ever met." The two peers burned letters in
her fireplace for many hours afterward. It is said her house smelled of
burnt paper and sealing wax for many weeks, and the stain to her white
mantel stayed for years. Five years later, Wellington was still burning
the prince's love letters to Mrs. Fitzherbert.

The four documents
she insisted on keeping were the mortgage on the Royal Pavilion at
Brighton (which the prince claimed to have given her but which she never
took possession of); her marriage certificate; a will the prince wrote
when they were estranged in 1796 (a year after he legally married
Caroline of Brunswick) in which he said Maria Fitzherbert was his true
wife; and an affidavit from the clergyman who performed their marriage
ceremony. These documents were deposited in Coutts bank, where they
stayed until the early twentieth century when they were placed in the
Royal Archives.

So why all the bloody secrecy? From the very
beginning of their love affair both the prince and Mrs. Fitzherbert knew
they could never legally marry, not just because of her Catholicism,
but because the Royal Marriage Act adopted by Parliament at the behest
of King George III forbade any member of the royal family from marrying
without the king's permission.

Because an act of Parliament took precedence over any church law, this illegal marriage was a criminal act.

When
the twenty-one year old prince met the twenty-seven-year old wealthy
widow (how they met is not revealed in this book) he fell madly in love
with her. She was flattered but not interested. Then he attempted to
stab himself to death to show that if he couldn't have her, he did not
wish to live. Drenched in his own blood, he summoned her. She did not
come. Ever mindful of her unblemished reputation, she finally consented
to come if the Duchess of Devonshire (who was close to the prince but
not to Mrs. Fitzherbert) would accompany her. Thus, properly chaperoned,
Mrs. Fitzherbert approached his bedside, the duchess produced a ring,
Mrs. Fitzherbert agreed to take the ring as a symbol of being pledged to
the prince, then she promptly fled the country with her friend, Lady
Anne.

A constant flurry of letters from the prince besieged her
wherever she went. When she returned a year and a half later, they wed
in a secret ceremony. Within months all of London knew of the secret
wedding, but neither party ever publicly admitted it, nor did they ever
live together in the same house. For the next nine years, Mrs.
Fitzherbert would be the chief woman in the prince's life. As time went
by, his affairs with other women and her bad temper transpired to cool
off the relationship, which terminated when Frances, Lady Jersey became
his lover. Under Lady Jersey's influence, he agreed to legally marry
Caroline of Brunswick in order to have his monstrous debts settled and
to acquire a larger annual income.

Even before his marriage, he
missed Mrs. Fitzherbert. Before he had been married a year, he rued his
real marriage and hungered for the renewal of his sham marriage to Maria
Fitzherbert. It took him another four years before he won her back.
There is some evidence that when she returned to him in 1800 she
stipulated that theirs be a non-sexual relationship.

This second
time they were together also lasted just under a decade, at which time
the prince took up with the married Lady Hertford and dropped Mrs.
Fitzherbert. A year later, he was named regent.

He and Mrs. Fitzherbert would never speak again, but financial settlements to Mrs. Fitzherbert increased.

There
is no evidence that Mrs. Fitzherbert ever bore a child, though she did
adopt two daughters to whom she was very kind and who were devoted to
her.

Shortly after he became king in 1820, his legal wife died,
but he never remarried. When he died 10 years later, he wore about his
neck a miniature of Mrs. Fitzherbert, the wife of his heart.

Mrs. Fitzherbert died in 1837 and was buried in Brighton.—Cheryl Bolen’s Countess by Coincidence, a sequel to Duchess by Mistake, releases this summer.

Monday, May 25, 2015

When I write historical romance, I like to let the history
lead me. In the case of my new Georgian romance, To Tame the Wind, the story of an English privateer and the
daughter of a French pirate, it led me straight to a spy in Paris in 1782, the
last year of the American Revolution.

Edward Bancroft

Edward Bancroft was an American scientist born in
Massachusetts in 1744 but raised in Connecticut. While growing up in Hartford,
Bancroft studied under Silas Deane, a lawyer.

After some years, and a jaunt in
Surinam, Bancroft went to live in London where he met Benjamin Franklin who
was then the agent for several of the Colonies. They became friends and Franklin
used Bancroft to spy on the British to support several of Franklin's colonial
activities.

In June of 1776, Bancroft’s former instructor, Silas Deane was sent to
France by Congress to induce the French to lend their financial aid to the
Colonies, which were about to declare their independence. Just after Deane arrived,
he sent a letter to Bancroft asking that he come to Paris, which Bancroft did.
They met in July and established
a close relationship, so that Deane confided to Bancroft the true nature of his
mission.

Benjamin Franklin

Deane
told Bancroft that he was attempting to obtain France’s aid for the Colonies
and to motivate a Bourbon-Prussian coalition against England to force
the British to redirect their power to a continental conflict and leave the Colonies
alone. The Americans expected France to come to their aid, which they ultimately
did. It may have seemed odd that the
Americans would approach France. It had not been that long ago as British
colonies they had fought alongside England against France. However, France was
humiliated after its defeat in the French and Indian Wars. England was its
enemy so France was happy to help America in order to check the British.

Toward the end of July 1776, Bancroft returned
to London. Before he left, he agreed to provide Deane with intelligence gleaned
from his contacts in England. But Bancroft’s new role did not sit well. He had
always supported British interests while adhering to the belief that the Colonies
and the crown had to come to some compromise. Now he realized that such a
compromise was impossible and he worried that French entry into the conflict could
destroy the British Empire.

In London, Bancroft met with one William
Eden, a character in my story, who became England’s spymaster, presiding over
its agents in Europe. They were joined by Lords Suffolk and Weymouth for a discussion
on “the colonial rebellion.” It was at this meeting that Bancroft was recruited
as a spy for the British. He later wrote of his decision:

I
had then resided near ten years, and expected to reside the rest of my life in
England; and all my views, interests and inclinations were adverse to the
independency of the colonies, though I had advocated some of their claims, from
a persuasion of their being founded in justice. I therefore wished, that the
government of this country, might be informed, of the danger of French
interference, though I could not resolve to become the informant. But… I at
length consented to meet the then Secretaries of State, Lords Weymouth and
Suffolk, and give them all the information in my power, which I did with the
most disinterested views.

When Benjamin Franklin arrived in Paris in December 1776,
Lord Suffolk told Bancroft to move to Paris and inject himself in Franklin's
circle, which he did, becoming the secretary to the American Mission. In that
role, Bancroft was privy to many secrets.

It was most interesting to me—and it is a part of my
story—that, in order to communicate with the British, Bancroft was told to
compose a series of letters about gallantry (ostensibly the writer's exploits
with ladies), which he was to address to a “Mr. Richards.” He was to sign the
letters as “Edward Edward.” (A bizarre moniker given his own name.) Between the
lines of his letters, he was to write in secret ink the information he
acquired. The letters were to be placed in a bottle in the hole of a certain
box tree in Paris. A man working for Lord Stormont then retrieved these
messages. (In my story, it is the hero, Simon Powell, who retrieves the
messages.)

Using this method, Bancroft supposedly provided
copies of hundreds of documents to his superiors in London. In one instance, the
French-American treaty was in King George's hand a mere 48 hours after it was
signed, courtesy of Bancroft.

Bancroft’s
final work as “Edward Edwards lasted from the start of peace negotiations in
the spring of 1782 to the signing of the preliminary peace accord on November
30 of that same year.

Whether Franklin knew of Bancroft’s perfidy is not clear. Franklin
did not write about it and Bancroft's personal papers were later destroyed by a
family member. (Bancroft’s missives were not discovered until seventy years
after his death when the British government provided access to its diplomatic
archives.)

In the end, while the British had effectively inserted a spy
within the American Commission in Paris, even with Bancroft the British were
unable to destroy the relationship Franklin had established with the French,
nor diminish France’s considerable support that led to America’s victory and
its independence.

Paris 1782…AN INNOCENT IS TAKEN

All Claire Donet knew was the world inside the convent walls in Saint-Denis. She had no idea her beloved papa was a pirate. But when he seized Simon Powell's schooner, the English privateer decided to take the one thing his enemy held most dear... her.

A BATTLE IS JOINED

The waters between France and England roil with the clashes of Claire's father and her captor as the last year of the American Revolution rages on the sea, spies lurk in Paris, and Claire’s passion for the English captain rises.

Friday, May 8, 2015

Today we buy our cleaning goods and our
remedies in ready-made bottles and cans and boxes.Prior to the era of mass manufacturing, which
started after the Regency, all these items were manufactured in the
household.This stands out at once in
the household books from the late 1700's and early 1800's.

The
variety of 'tips' offered is astonishing, covering everything from cookery for the
sick, to making pomades, to how to blacken fire grates and clean marble, to how
to keep the rot off sheep.("Keep
them in pens till the dew is off the grass," advises Mrs. Rundell in her book on Domestic
Cookery.)

Some
directions are quite straightforward.To
keep a door from squeaking, "Rub a bit of soap on the hinges."Other directions can list either products not
readily available today, such as the orris-root and storax listed in a recipe
for potpourri, or the spermaceti (from whales) to be used to make ointment for chapped
lips.Also, amounts are often
inexact.For chapped lip, "twopenny-worth
of alkanet-root" is also required--probably a small amount, unless
alkanet-root came very, very cheep.

Amounts
are often listed as handfuls, as in the rue, sage, mint, rosemary, wormwood and
lavender for a "recipt against the plague" given by Hanna Glasse in The
Art of Cookery made Plain and Easy.She also offers not one, but two certain cures for the "bite of a
mad dog, one of which is both given to the "man or beast" bitten as
well as recommending to be bound into the wound.

Within
the household, items would be made for beauty as well as practicality.Recipes are given for Hungary Water (early
cologne), which took a month to actually make.There is also Lavender Water, a recipe to prevent hair from falling out
and thicken it which includes using honey and rosemary tops, a paste for
chapped hands, and pomades for the hair.

The
time spent on making up these recipes could be considerable.To make black ink with rain water, bruised
blue galls, brandy and a few other items meant stirring the concoction every
day for three weeks.Other recipes, such
as Shank Jelly for an invalid, requires lamb to be left salted for four hours,
then brushed with herbs and simmered for five hours.Time passed differently in the 1800's.

Sick
cookery is an item of importance, from recipes for heart burn to how to make
"Dr. Ratcliff's restorative Pork Jelly."Coffee milk is recommended for invalids as is
asses' milk, milk porridge, saloop (water, wine, lemon-peel and sugar),
chocolate, barley water, and baked soup.

An
interesting distinction is made in that recipes pertaining to personal
appearance and sick-cookery address the reader--and owner of the book.However, recipes for household cleaning and
those not related to a person--such as how to mend china--are listed under
"Directions to Servants."This
shows clearly the distinction that the mistress of the house also acted as
mistress of the still room, tending to the really important matters, and
leaving the heavy work to her staff.

Welcome to Historical Hussies

Welcome to our blog for readers and writers--or anyone, really, who loves history! Donna Hatch, Shannon Donnelly, Cheryl Bolen, Beppie Harrison, Jenna Jaxon, and Katherine Bone are historical romance authors. Very well, we confess; we're historical nerds! We are fascinated with ancient wedding traditions, Irish food, Roman Warfare, Regency Clothing, Scottish swords--you get the idea. Watch our blog for informative tidbits that just might figure in your next manuscript or deepen your appreciation for the next book you read, or even give you some useless trivia to spout at a party when you can't think of a thing to say.We welcome comments and followers, so chime in and enjoy the group!